Logo for writer Charles McCabe's column. McCabe (1915-1883) worked at The Chronicle from the mid-1950s until his death.

Logo for writer Charles McCabe's column. McCabe (1915-1883) worked at The Chronicle from the mid-1950s until his death.

Photo: Xx

Image 3 of 3

The 'Frisco Mystique

1 / 3

Back to Gallery

One day early this year I was parked in front of my hotel on the Rue Castiglione in Paris. I returned from a brief walk down to the W.H. Smith bookstore on Rue Rivoli, where I had purchased a couple of newspapers. On my return, there was a gendarme writing out a ticket, presumably for illegal parking.

In these border clashes in strange lands, I find it useful to forget what little French I know. Assuming an injured mien, I rattled off some kind of speech in English. Somewhere in the course of my oration, I had cause to mention San Francisco. At the mention of these words, the gendarme's pen wrote no more. "Ah, San Francisco," he said, with a kind of reverence.

I don't ask that you believe the story, or that I did not get the ticket, for I scarce believe it myself. But I do ask you to believe its essence, which is that the Europe I know takes a wholly irrational and wholly adoring view of our mixed-up metropolis.

You mention that you are from San Francisco, and you are immediately a gent, as distinct from the yahoos who bully blacks and throw tear gas at kids who dislike the Vietnam War and live in ticky-tacky houses and go to ticky-tacky supermarkets.

As a San Franciscan, in the eyes of most Europeans, you are really a civilized European who accidentally latched onto some citizenship papers and lives, distinct from your countrymen, in an Arcadian enclave in wondrous California.

To your friends, you protest. Humans in San Francisco, you say, are just the same as those elsewhere. They have the edge over most Americans in that they live in a more beautiful and stimulating environment, but they exhibit an extraordinary facility for lousing it up with freeways, high-rises, telephone poles, topless joints and other indecencies.

Usually, your little lecture is to no avail. San Francisco, like John F. Kennedy, has been formally canonized in Europe. Anyone who is related to either of these comes to Switzerland, England, France and even Italy with money in the bank.

It comes as no news to anyone that Europeans hate our guts. We are their upstart offspring. We are the Prodigal Son who never returned. Instead, we became rich enough to buy the whole world. We are power and thrust such as humankind has never seen. Our companies abroad dominate the economy of Western Europe.

When we are in Europe, we wear funny hats and tell people to speak English, Sonny, and never even bother to learn the value of its money, so contemptuous are we of it.

The traveling American, en masse, tends to be a quite awful advertisement for his country and his culture.

It is almost as if he had left his real virtues and abilities in Paris and London in a way he wouldn't dare in Phoenix or Wichita. He cares about people in Phoenix and their opinion. He does not care about people in Paris. How can it surprise him that his contempt is richly requited?

We are not loved abroad, and with reason.

But in every hate relationship, there enters love, just as vice versa. Sustained and unmitigated hate is an emotion almost impossible to sustain for ordinary humans.

So there is Jack Kennedy. So there is San Francisco. These things remind Europeans of the America they have always admired: the America of Benjamin Franklin, of Abraham Lincoln, of Yankee handiness and ingenuity, of the Mississippi of Mark Twain, of the spacious plains and the beautiful Washington and old Philadelphia, of friendliness to travelers.

It is disconcerting to be taken at higher than your own valuation by total strangers. In Europe, this has happened to me repeatedly in recent years. It has happened simply because I live in San Francisco.